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Vitamini((C) by STK): my Mini Coil System (wound on an 1" Vitamin C - tube)
This is one of my current projects, therefore this page is heavily
!
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Table of contents:
(26.07.2002
an 15.08.02)
Wiring scheme:
C1 C2 C3 C4
O----||---o---||---o---||---o---||----o row 1
|
o----||---o---||---o---||---o---||----o row 2
|
o----||---o---||---o---||---o---||----o row 3
|
o----||---o---||---o---||---o---||----o row 4
|
O----||---o---||---o---||---o---||----o row 5
C20
|
The gap (2mm wide) between the rows has the advantage that you can inspect
the sidewalls of the caps in case some of them blew. Size is approx.
17x17cm2. Height of the caps is approx. 2.7cm. I use an 1.8MegOhm
bleeding resistor across each cap. Therefore the bleeding current is 0.56mA
or with other words about 0.9% losses (using 100BPS x Ec). Total loss is
about 1.3% instead of 20% using the saltwatercaps. The old SW test cap (very
thin glas) was 20x20x14 cm3. The losses in the glass were approx.
12W. Ceramik doorknob caps will be smaller (look at Terry Fritz' webpage)
but much more expensive.
Technical data of the ERO-caps (KP1836, 62nF, 1000Vdc):
| description | high dV/dt rates, high current handling capabilities | ||||||||||||
| application | High voltage, very high current and high pulse operations, deflection circuits in TV sets (fly-back tuning). Protection circuits in SMPSs. Snubber and SCR commutating circuits. |
||||||||||||
| rated voltage | 1000VDC | ||||||||||||
| permissible AC voltages (rms) up to 60Hz | 330VAC | ||||||||||||
| test voltage | 2000VDC for 2s | ||||||||||||
| self inductance | ~6nH | ||||||||||||
| dielectric | polypropylene film | ||||||||||||
| electrodes | aluminium foil | ||||||||||||
| construction | extended aluminium foil, internal series connection, double-sided metallized polyester carrier film |
||||||||||||
| maximum pulse rise time | 1500V/µs | ||||||||||||
| dissipation factor (tand) at 100kHz | 1e-3 | ||||||||||||
| permissible AC voltage versus frequency (cw) |
|
Now lets calculate how hard I drive them:
I use 2 chains of 20 caps in series. My frequency is 800kHz.I use 10kVeff,
tank circuit data is ~6.2nF/~9uH which works out to 14kV/370A peak values
(Z=38Ohms). Calculation of the actual rise time: 1/4 period of 800kHz is
0.3125µs. In this time, the voltage rises from 0V to Vpeak, for the
rise time the steep beginning is the point to view at. Here the rise time
is Pi/2 higher than the average, resulting in 14kV*Pi/2 per 0.3125µs
over 20 caps in series. Result is 3.5kV/µs per cap instead of the rated
1.5kV/µs and therefore factor 2.4 above the specs.
Now lets look at the AC-voltage. Duty cycle is low, so the derating due to
thermal problems is negligible. 20 Caps in series with permissible 330Vrms
(due to corona build up) are 6.6kVrms total. I apply 10kVrms, this is factor
1.5 above the specs.
Now on to the DC-voltage. 20 Caps in series with permissible 1000Vdc are
20kVdc total. I apply 10kVrms, this is 14.1kVpeak and therefore only factor
0.7 of the rated voltage (that means I'm in the specs here).
Total inductance in my series/parallel connected MMC is 1/2*20*6nH which
is 60nH and therefore 1/150 of my primaries inductance and therefore also
negligible.
All in all, I drive them too hard, yes. But considering the fact that a typical
hobby coilers system will run not more than 1 hour every weekend for max.
10 years, the caps should survive only a total runtime of 500 hours and not
the 10XX hours, the manufacturer gives the specs for.
One thing to consider though: the MMC consists of many (n*m) caps, therefore
the lifetime of the MMC (before the FIRST cap will fail) is approx. 1/(m*n)
the liftetime of one cap alone.
Read more about MMCs on the GTL-Website
http://beam.to/gtl (sorry, this is only
in German!).
For increased cap lifetime I added about 38Ohms in series to the safety gap
for reducing the stress on the caps (rise time) down to the value of standard
TC operation (with other words, I limit the current to a value below
370Apeak this way).
| First test run (with sw-test-cap!): 7.5cm long arc from wire on
toroid T2 to ground wire. Seems that the 4.3pF toroid is to small (many breakouts
at same time). The distance between the strike rail and the toroid is about
14cm. Lots of corona (a really blue cone) from strike rail to secondary.
Tapping between turn 9, 10 and 11 brought no difference in output length.
Even between turn 8 and 12 only a very small difference was detectable.
Conclusion: the system seems to be extremely overcoupled and the secondary
therefore has to be raised some cm upwards. Second test run (with sw-test-cap!): much more top load (T2 + T1 + T3 + 8cm-ball), 11.5cm arcs to grounded wire. Tap point at turn 11. Secondary was rised so that the lowest turn is now 1cm above the first primary turn. Breakout also from top turn, so a small toroid should be placed between top turn and big toroid. The corona cone is still present. Third test run (with sw-test-cap!): For the third run, I made a small toroid which can slide up and down on the secondary above the winding. The strike rail is now replaced by a smoother one with thicker wire diameter. Breakout from the top turns and the corona cone are supressed this way. The secondary now can also slide up and down on a smaller tube inside it, so the coupling is adjustable. Again, 11.5cm max. arc length (as always: more topload - longer sparks). First test run in twin mode (with sw-test-cap!): 11cm arc length between the secondaries (no ground wire attached!). With other words: I doubled the voltage but couldn't achieve longer sparks. As suggested by many other advanced coilers, I can now say by own experience that it is the power that makes the spark length, not the voltage. |
| First test runs with matched MKP-multicap-cap (again in twin
mode): 20cm arc length (16.02.99)
between the secondaries (no ground wire attached!). The bigger tank cap (as
opposed to the test runs with the SW-cap) allowed me to use bigger toploads
here: main toroids are 17cm x 6cm and 19cm x 4.5cm on
top of the two small toroids mentioned above. There is a lot of energy inside
the small system now, I got sparks all over the secondaries up and down -
even on the twin secondary which is only driven by the base current!! Frequency
of this setup was about 715kHz (turn 9, which is
about 8µH(???) and 6.2nF in the tank
circuit) or, when calculated via the data of the secondaries (4.18mH, parasitic
capacitance around 2.23pF, toroid capacitance about
8pF), 770kHz. Considering
the fact of the toroid capacitance being not known very well and 5% tolerance
of the tank caps, this is a good match of the two results. With the new MKP-Caps,
the arcs are much longer and louder now. I place the twin now always in a
distance of 16cm (at the end of the extending bus bar), this will give a
beautiful display of a heavy, continuous and very long arc. An impressive demonstration would be a 25W light bulb inserted into the base wire. It will light up as driven with about 5W (guess). Ok, only 1/36th of the input power is not very spektacular. But this is the average power! Duty cycle is only about 0.0025 and therefore the peak power dissipated in the filament will be approx. 2kW. No wonder that the filament was dancing around heavily inside the bulb :-) |
Data has to be recalculated! I made some minor changes on the geometry of the primary and never checked the values against a second program, so it might be a bit off. Toroid capacitance is not determined very well because of the two toroid approach (which has not found its way into an easy mathematical expression up to now).
 |
 |
| test setup with sw-test-cap | third test run (with sw-test-cap) |
|
final configuration (MKP-caps and twin setup)
(26.07.2002) |
|
Kurt's Black&White (40cm dia) and my Vitamini (2.9cm
dia) (29.07.2002) |
 |
| Vitamini has a big advantage over Black&White: you can store her in a small card box (31x22x25cm3 ;-)) (15.08.2002) |
 |
| Here you can see the toroid arrangement. The grey cylindrical thing below
the twin is just a box. The small anti corona ring on the secondary can slide up and down to find the best position. (15.08.2002) |
 |
| A look inside. In the box are the main power switch, the line filter,
the compensation cap (now reduced to only half of the original value due to space restrictions), the 12VDC power supply for the fan, the fan, the two HV xfmrs and the spark gap. In the middle layer, the caps with their bleeding resistors are located as well as the safety gap with its current limiting resistors. On top of all is the primary. (15.08.2002) |
 |
| ... some more details: You can see the fan in the left
front corner and the outlet holes on the backside directly behind the spark gap. every second gap is shorted with a small crokodile clamp because the gaps are made a bit to wide. I shorted every second gap instead of just taping only e.g. the left half of them to spread the heat over them all. (15.08.2002) |
 |
| Primary construction and strike rail. You can see now that I removed
the three outermost turns (unused) to prevent the primary from further arcing to the strike rail. (15.08.2002) |
 |
| The parts of the secondary. On the top of the secondary, I screwed an
empty film container (ask in a photo shop) and srewed the top lid beneath the toroids. So I can simply snap the toroids onto the secondary. (15.08.2002) |
 |
| The parts of the twin (second secondary). Here the toroid arrangement
can be slid onto the film container. The original lid of the 'Vitamin C' - tube was mounted onto the cylindrical box, so I can snap the secondary in place. (15.08.2002) |
Yes, the housing is ugly (I used what I had at hand, perhaps
I paint it somewhere in the future). After seeing Richard Hull's
Tesla coil
in an Attache case, I decided to try this with my Vitamini if time permitts
(I'll skip the Variac and place the twin inside the case instead of
it)... |
|
Some electrical data around the current twin system (values are not fixed because I'm still 'playing'):
9.5kVeff, <182W, ~6.2nF/~9uH tank circuit => 14kV/370A peak values (Z=38Ohms), f~800kHz, top load ~ 7pF => max. output 400kV (from Ep=Es) , 20cm arcs, that equals 9.1W/cm.
Some thoughts on twin coils:
I for myself prefere to look at the base current going into the secondary here: In a standard 2-coil system, the secondary is grounded at its base. Here you have the base current Is.
_________ |
If you connect an identically twin secondary and disconnect the gnd and drive only the first secondary as before (by the primary), then the behaviour of the coil should NOT change:
_________ _________
(_________)==^-~´\,-~´`-~(_________)
I I ItI
I I IwI
I I IiI
I I InI
IcI IcI
IoI IoI
\ IiI / IiI
\IlI/ IlI
+-----------o------------+
|
virtual gnd point
(not connected to any real gnd!!!)
|
The current is not going into the (now virtual) gnd anymore but into the base of the twin secondary instead. Same current as before with only one secondary and therefore the same voltage appearing at the discharge terminal. With the phase shift of 180°, the potential difference between the two toroids is now two times Vo!! With the same energy consumption as before. I can't imagine why the base current should change when you replace the 'mirror plane' (real gnd) for a real coil. I have no scope until now, so I can't measure the base currents in the two configurations. Please mail me, if you have any thoughts on this!
Update May'99: the new gap (flat arrangement of copper pipes)
I'm currently making a new gap. Total gap width should be around 7mm for 9.5kV. Due to the limited space, I only can make 10 gaps. For adding some flexibility, I try to space them each 0.63mm+0.254mm=0.884mm. The strange values are based on some ceramic spacers I have at hand :-) I think I'll need somewhere around 6.9mm total gap width, this will be 8 gaps (the gaps will decrease a bit if the spacers are removed because I mount them with some tension on the base board). So I have 2 gaps more for compensating some corrosion which will occure over the time. For the beginning, I'll short these two gaps with two small crocodile clamps.
It is obvious that this mini coil system is
still to big and heavy to convert it into a battery-powered system.
So perhaps I'll build a true Micro Coil System (µTC) with
some of these smaller commercial MKP-caps sometimes...
YES, I do have some ideas of its values:
Stunguns usually run on 2 x 9V in parallel (alkaline batteries) because they are very powerhungry (approx 2.5A). With the voltage dropping down to 8V this results in 20W. A 9V battery of the brand 'Energizer' has 600mAh. If we leave 100mAh in the battery, we have 1Ah. That leads to 24 minutes max. total runtime. That's ok for a 20W batterie powered µTC which will be only a gimmik and will be designed for several short-time runs of max. 30 seconds each.
Considering the losses below 5W, the output would be in the range of 15W(cw).
Power = Ec x bps, with the data given above: 15W / (1/2 x 2.6n x 15000^2) = 51bps. I won't use a higher capacitance because this would lead to a physically bigger cap. So it will get a max spark length of 0.85 x 7cm = 6cm. The reduced bps (51 instead of 100) reduces the output by a factor of 0.85 according to a fit of my own measurements on my 2"-system. An 50bps-TC with 15W equals an 100bps-TC with 30W when you reduce the spark length by this factor of 0.85. The named 7cm are the value of this 'virtual' 30W/100bps-TC (from the 'bad value'-curve in the efficiency diagram on my technological background page).
This all leads to approx. 6cm spark length for this batterie powered µTC!
If I would use a 7x higher capacitance (18nF), the spark length should increase to 14cm!!! Guess what I'm doing now? Yes, you got it - I'm going to look for smaller caps (1000VDC => 20x 330nF, 630V => 32x 560nF or 38x 680nF).....
(Oops - perhaps I should try to get some data on the stungun first :-)
Fuer die 1"-Microcoil sollte ich ein paar WIMAs
uebriglassen und als EMMC konfigurieren:
4.75kV / 18mA mit 120% resosize macht 14nF.
Zwei WIMAs in Serie ergibt 16.5nF => passt
ACpeak ist 7.1kV, ok bei 12kVDC.
AC-faktor ist 5, das ist doppelt so hoch wie im 4"-MMC, also guter Test.
Kurt's WIMA-MMC liefert "fully safe design"
drei WIMAs in Serie ergibt 11nF => passt auch noch (fast
genau reso=12nF)
ACpeak ist 7.1kV, ok bei 18kVDC.
AC-faktor ist 3.4, das ist 1.5 fach so hoch wie im 4"-MMC, also auch noch
ein guter Test.
Statt der WIMAs (33nF/6kV) mit den KP1836 von ERO:
7 caps ist "fully safe" nach Terry's MMC-calc bei 22C/W (siehe Auslegung
des 2"-MMCs, update March'2002) => 9nF
6 caps ist "nearly safe" nach Terry's MMC-calc bei 22C/W =>
10.3nF
5 caps wäre 12.4nF
4 caps wäre 15.5nF
